EXETER.

Of gardens and moors.

And then we’re off again to Exeter to stay in an old house that’s been made into a hotel, the Best Western Lord Haldon. We're breaking the trip up on the way to Penzance so we're not here long. I wonder as we try to find this place that the daughter has led me astray as we are in tiny, curving one way laneways and I dread the thought of someone coming the other way but there it is, just a right turn near a lovely old stone bridge.  

It looks out over artistically placed fields and so we wander off for a walk and we come across an open garden with proceeds going to charity.  We take a peak and then we walk into a wonderland. It is beyond any garden I have ever seen.  We walk through rhododendron forests, gnarled ancient trunks dating back a hundred years are laden with flowers, the ground beneath covered with coloured petals.

There are dells and streams lined with spring flowers, small waterfalls and ducks. A huge garden of multi coloured azaleas shimmer in the afternoon light. Fuschias hang delicately over man made lakes, yellow irises and arum lillies hugging the edges. There’s a lilac circle - a lilac circle! Can you imagine the perfume, there’s even a two toned one. 

We are still looking for where to donate our money when we come out into a clearing behind the house and there’s a stall full of cakes and a woman who manages it (and an Air BnB close by). They don’t take credit card and I haven’t got English pounds out yet so she takes Euros and gives a huge slices of her cakes to take with us.  A carrot cake, a Devon tea cake. A ginger one and a cherry cake with marzipan icing. We have breakfast sorted.  

We walk back, satiated with the incredible garden and sit in the garden and have a large Cider. Then we eat a strange Indian curry meal at our hotel and I look out over the fields at the slow setting sun.

Next morning we’re on our way via stone circles that the daughter keeps finding close by in the Bodmin moors.  By the time we get off the highway and drive on tiny roads across flat land they’re not so close but they’re so interesting. Then we stop at St Austell for a ruin that the girls walk up into, or rather go up ladders into what was once an old monastery.

Supposedly someone had died of leprosy there, other rumours abound.  The girls run into two women and one of them leaves as she said the energy is too sad. And then we stop for a meal in yet another wonderful old pub, The Victoria , on our way to Penzance.